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The prevailing idea in Professor Mowrer's new book that emotions (fear in particular) are powerful and prevalent mediators of behavior will not be unfamiliar to readers of Psychoanalysis who have more than a nodding acquaintance with Freud's The Problem of Anxiety. This idea which is central to Mowrer's “new two-factor” theory is an extension and elaboration of the first paper (A Stimulus-Response Analysis of Anxiety and its Role As a Reinforcing Agent, 1939) in which Mowrer emphasized the similarity between acquisition of mechanisms of defense proposed by Freud and Pavlovian defense conditioning, particularly with respect to the role of anxiety. In both instances, the organism acquires some response which removes it from a threatening stimulus which has become aversive through association with a painful event. In the case of a laboratory animal, a neutral signal is paired with shock, which the animal can avoid by making some response. After a number of “conditioning trials” a response to the conditioned stimulus avoids the shock. Much the same basic process is assumed to take place in human avoidance learning (acquisition of neuroses etc.) except that the conditioned stimuli may be internalized and highly symbolic while the conditioned responses, subtle forms of defense behavior.
The use of fear as a mediating variable to account for the acquisition and maintenance of avoidance and defense reactions was not extant in academic psychology until Mowrer, among others, re-cast Freud's conception of anxiety, as process, into stimulus-response terminology.
At the turn of the century, there were two prevalent notions regarding the basic process of learning; one proposed by Pavlov stressed the idea of conditioning (stimulus substitution) while, the other, formulated by Thorndike, was concerned with reward or “trial and error” learning (response substitution). Both systems constituted the first two-factor theory of learning, according to Mowrer, but neither utilized intervenin